Quirky Sermons

January 1, 2017

Preaching my first sermon at seven months pregnant, 12/1/2013.

I get the pleasure & privilege of giving sermons from time to time, usually from the stage of True North Community Church, a non-denominational church on Long Island. I love it. I usually crack up laughing in the middle of it. I feel so lucky to do it.

Just so you know: I’ve never gone to seminary; my education consists of a BA and MFA in Writing & Literature. But if you’re curious how a non-religiously-raised writer ended up preaching oddball sermons, see the bottom of this post.

All these videos start with the band, so you’ll have to skip forward a bit to find the sermon…

Part One:A sermon about God’s presence in our times of suffering often arrives in the form of wonder and beauty.Also: Whale hearts, peacock mantis shrimp, morbid rumination, and the book of Job.

Part Two:A sermon about how we can be present to others in their suffering through small acts of beauty.Also: Eric the Flying Man, tiny beautiful things, and the story of The Killing Machine vs. Chanel #5.

A sermon about the conundrums and possibilities of desire. Including an exercise to make a quick map of your own desires–and how they might become a place where you encounter God.Also: How I got seduced in the grocery store aisle, Knicks announcer Walt Clyde Frazier, citrus-scented body wash and semi-automatic weapons.

A sermon about being a work in progress.Especially for: Weirdos like me who are skeptics by nature but intrigued by the Gospels. Anybody whose faith is never going to look like a nice, tidy suburban lawn. Christians freaked out by their own doubts. (Don’t freak out.)Also: The toilet that showed up in my yard; the theological implications of flipping the bird; Jesus’ skeptical streak; the embarrassing truth that I can’t grow grass for crap.

A sermon about God as the divine Lover in pursuit, plus the wild and social-change-inducing role of Biblical prophets.Also: This one’s just audio, and you need to know that it begins with a 6’3″, very hairy-chested man in a ruffled, fruit-decked Carmen Miranda outfit walking out and handing me a mango and a love note.

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If you’re curious how all this came about:

Who am I to preach? Yeah, agreed. I was raised in a completely nonreligious house, went to an artsy secular college, and had a long journey of seeking that eventually brought me to this life of attempting to follow Jesus.

How did I end up preaching, given that I never went to seminary? I did take the Episcopal Church’s Education for Ministry course and learned a ton about sermon-crafting through the example of Bert Crabbe, lead pastor of True North Community Church, and Rob Bell’s Poets, Prophets and Preachers series. But mostly I just read the Bible for years on end with deep fascination, and I like to nerd out seeking cultural/historical background and other people’s thinking on it; and through my MFA in Writing program, I realized I love to teach.

Why do I call these quirky sermons? My outsider eyes/nonreligious background/progressive/artsy/social justice roots often bleed through, and I’m drawn to the wonderfully weird (see subtitles above), and that is why I warn people these are Quirky Sermons. But giving them is one of the things that makes me most come alive, every time, and I still can’t believe that they let me do it.